5/25/14

Poem: The Monster

One with the golden eagle of the morning,Flat and flung wide above the spinning plains,It seemed my spirit sprang and wheeled and flew.The world went under us like a river of light,An ecstasy of order, where each life,Rejoicing in its law, rushed to its end:To break itself and breed; the embattled vines,Grassland and grainland waved their thousand spearsIn one wild rhythm as they swept along,A map of marching armies, all one way;And ploughmen on their uplands ribbed with gold,Went forward happy, with their backs to heaven.

Only the sacred eagle up the streamStrove back to his beginnings; left behindThe white archaic dawns on herbless hills,The first cold hues of chaos; like a stairMounted the soundless cataracts of the sun,Seeking the sun of suns; till suddenlyThe last heavens opened; for one flash I sawSomething too large and calm for sight or reason,The Urns of Evil and Good, vast as two worlds,And over them a larger face than Fate'sOf that first Will that is when all was not.But that unblinded burning eagle soaredAnd perched upon His thunderous right hand.I cowered, and heard a cry torn out of meIn an unknown tongue older than all my race,"O Father of Gods and Men"; and saw no more.

The vulture from his dark and hairy nestFar down the low-browed cliffs of the abyssStood black against the sun; a shape of shame:A plumed eclipse; and all the ways of menWere paved with upturned faces; masks of hate:For that hooked head was like a horrible tool,An instrument of torture made aliveWith creaking pinions; for what end they knew:The vulture of the vengeance of the gods.

For a red under-light on all that land,A hell that is the underside of heaven,Glowed from men's struggling fires; and as I followedThat evil bird over lost battle-fields,Where panoplied and like fallen palacesThe great and foolish kings who warred with doomLay sunken with their star; I saw far off,Misshapen, against the dark red dome of sky,A mountain on a mountain. As I gazedThe shape seemed changed: the upper mountain moved.It heaved vast flanks ribbed like the red-ribbed hills,Thrust down an uprooted forest with one heelAnd stretched a Titan's arm to touch the sky.

"You slay for ever, but you slay too late;A stolen secret turns not home again.While I lie lifted high against your wrath,Hanged on this gibbet of rock, far down belowThe fire is spreading on the earth's dark plainsAnd my red stars come forth like flowers of nightAnd my red sun burns when your white sun dies.See where man's watchfire dances and derides,The sickly servile sunset crawling away:Lo; my red banner thrashes through the air,Nor dare your vulture peck it if he pass."

The vulture passed, a shadow on the fire,And the dark hills were loud with dreadful cries.

I woke; the skies were empty of the eagle,And empty of the vulture all the abyss:And something in the yawning silence criedGiants and gods were dying in new dawns:Daylight itself had deepened; there opened in itNew depths or new dimensions; stone and treeIn that strange light grew solid; as does a statueOr many-sided monument set besideThe flattened fables on a bas-relief.Only in dark thin lines against the dawnThe last and lingering monsters limped away,The boys with crooked legs and cries of goatsRan as from one pursuing; amid the weedsWailed the strange women, neither fish nor flesh,And from the hoary splendours of the seaRose Triton with the limbs that curled like whirlpools,Stonily staring at some sign afar.

For a new light in a new silence shoneFrom some new nameless quarter of the skyBehind us on the road; and all strange thingsLooked back to something stranger than themselvesAnd, towering still and trampling, the Last CentaurCried in a roar that shook the shuddering trees,"We rode our bodies without bridle at will,We hurled our high breasts forward on flying hooves:But these two bodies are a simple thingBeside that Fear that comes upon the world.A Monster walks behind." I dared not turn;A shape lay like a shadow on the road.I saw not but I heard; a sound more awful,Then from the blackest cypress-close the callOf some dark Janus shouting with two mouths: